Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

The sum of lifetime exposures to nongenetic drivers of health and illness, from conception to death, is called the exposome.17 The exposome encompasses chemical, social, psychological, ecological, historical, political, and biological elements

A damaged cell will release damage-associated molecular patterns triggering inflammation.112 For example, an abundance of uric acid, a highly inflammatory molecule produced by cellular damage, creates the clinical syndrome known as gout.

As the philosopher Wendy Brown puts it, from the perspective of the modern imperial hub, “we have culture while they are a culture.”

Most doctors—most humans, really—have unwittingly inherited a colonial worldview that emphasizes individual health, disconnecting illness from its social and historical contexts and obscuring our place in the web of life that makes us who we are.

that determine whether aging cells will become drivers of chronic systemic inflammation.18

The fall of beaver populations also changed the way rivers ran across the North American continent. The biodiversity that thrived because of the beaver’s hydrological engineering plummeted. With their dams, beavers create successional habitats that provide slow-moving water sanctuaries for plants, insects, and other animals, such as salmon. As dema

The “self” of immunology is more porous and fluid than the one in liberal political science, able to be shaped by social, economic, and political injustices. Matzinger herself wrote, “The immune system does not care about self and non-self[;] its primary driving force is the need to detect and protect against danger.”107 In other words, it is “more

colonialism isn’t simply the physical occupation of land. It is a process, an operation of power in which one cosmology is extinguished and replaced with another. In

If you find yourself more convinced by studying skeletal remains than by listening to the oral histories of Indigenous people, you’re a participant in a colonial system of organizing truth. Reconstructing history through bones misses much that oral histories capture. Yet in a colonial world, stories passed down by Indigenous elders cannot be consid